Storage reorganization may be motivated by any number of reasons. For example, storage migration and consolidation are important operations that help reduce the total cost of ownership of storage servers in an enterprise. One important factor in reducing total cost of ownership is to reduce the time and expense required to manage storage servers, and thus the number of servers. Unsurprisingly, storage consolidation often occurs in conjunction with an upgrade to a newer, more performant server version such as moving from Microsoft® Windows NT Server version 4.0 to Microsoft® Windows Server 2003. Storage administrators may take advantage of such an upgrade to reduce management overhead by consolidating storage from many legacy servers onto one or fewer new machines that may serve all the content that was on the legacy servers.
In relocating file shares from two servers, such as “foo” and “bar”, one common strategy deployed is to map both the server name “foo” and the server name “bar” to the same storage server. One problem that may occur in this reorganization of storage is a resulting name clash from trying to relocate two file shares with the same name, such as \\foo\public and \\bar\public, onto the same storage server. Normally two shares would need to be created, both with the path name \\server\public. Such a name clash could be avoided by renaming one or both of the relocated shares, using one or more well known techniques such as versioning. However, system administrators may be reluctant to consolidate legacy shares if they must modify the file share names to avoid such a name clash.
Modifying a file share name visible to a user to avoid a name clash raises several problems. First of all, modifying a file share name visible to a user during reorganizing storage would require training users to use the new names. Furthermore, file share path names that are embedded in documents, web pages, and applications would need to be located and the old names would need to be changed to the new names. These burdensome activities would require additional time and expense for a storage administrator managing reorganization of storage.
What is needed is a way for a storage administrator to reorganize storage using legacy share names so that users or clients may access the relocated legacy shares using the legacy share names. Any such system and method should allow a system administrator to easily and efficiently monitor client access to the relocated legacy shares so that the storage administrator may retire relocated legacy shares that are infrequently used.